Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy eBook

I

Lockeandthefrontiersofcommonsense[1]

A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate
background. His is not a figure to stand statuesquely
in a void: the pose might not seem grand enough
for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted
in the manner of the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior,
scrupulously furnished with all the implements of
domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the
Holy Bible open majestically before him, and beside
it that other revelation—­the terrestrial
globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope
set for examining the internal constitution of a beetle:
but for the moment his eye should be seen wandering
through the open window, to admire the blessings of
thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily
busy in the market-place, wrong as many a monkish
notion might be that still troubled their poor heads.
From them his enlarged thoughts would easily pass
to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly
setting sail for the Indies, or for savage America.
Yes, he too had travelled, and not only in thought.
He knew how many strange nations and false religions
lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the
universe. There were few ingenious authors that
he had not perused, or philosophical instruments that
he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested;
and no man better than he could understand and prize
the recent discoveries of “the incomparable
Mr Newton”. Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness
in that spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows
in that aquiline countenance, would suggest that in
the midst of their earnest eloquence the philosopher’s
thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed,
the visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of
his problem; for there was also what he called “the
scene of ideas”, immaterial and private, but
often more crowded and pressing than the public scene.
Locke was the father of modern psychology, and the
birth of this airy monster, this half-natural changeling,
was not altogether easy or fortunate.[2]

I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture
as the subject deserves, and to trace home the sources
of Locke’s opinions, and their immense influence.
Unfortunately, I can consider him—­what is
hardly fair—­only as a pure philosopher:
for had Locke’s mind been more profound, it
might have been less influential. He was in sympathy
with the coming age, and was able to guide it:
an age that confided in easy, eloquent reasoning,
and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next,
with as little philosophy and as little religion as
possible. Locke played in the eighteenth century
very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his
opinions became a point of departure for universal
developments. The more we look into the matter,